REVIEWS

Taylor and Francis RIHR_A_312635.sgm 10.1080/1749 970802124692 Inte lectual History Review 749-6977 (pri t)/1749-6985 (online) eviews 2 08rnational So ety for Intellectual History 8 0 0002008 Cha lot eMosedal charl t e.m @tandf.co.uk Deborah E. Harkness, The Jewel House: Elizabethan London and the Scientific Revolution (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 2007), xviii + 349 pp., $32.50 (hb), ISBN 978-0-30011196-5

city's sciences into a body of knowledge and expertise in the service of the crown and state. This chapter, in the middle of the book and at the heart of its thesis, sets up a connection between Cecil's ministerial efforts to orchestrate science for the public good and the top-down model of learned (and genteel) management proposed by Bacon in The New Atlantis and The Advancement of Learning, dissected at length in the final chapter, where Bacon is contrasted to that emblem of curiosity, Hugh Plat. Not all readers will be convinced that Cecil's activities were as pre-determined and thought through as Harkness suggests, but the notion that Bacon's understanding of the possibilities offered by the sciences was shaped (despite his efforts to obscure it) by exposure to Elizabethan London is utterly compelling. Harkness's take on Bacon (which, understandably, is not entirely sympathetic given his scorn of 'mere' practitioners) will doubtless generate considerable debate, not least because it questions history of science's continuing obsession with great men and great works, print over manuscript, and ideas over objects by suggesting that this historiographical tradition began with Bacon and was passed, myopically, on to the Royal Society and thence to posterity.
Nobody, however, whatever their own methodological predilections, could fail to be impressed by the breadth and depth of scholarship on display here. Harkness deftly treats a range of topics that have emerged over the past decade or so as key loci for the pursuit of natural knowledge in the Early Modern period. The work of William Sherman, Ann Blair, and Harold Love on note-taking and manuscript circulation underpins Harkness's account of Hugh Plat and Clement Draper's scientific investigations, their recording and ordering, while Jim Bennett and Stephen Johnston's studies of mathematical practitioners inform a succinct chapter on the relationship between instrumentation and mathematics. Harold Cook and Margaret Pelling's work on the world of physicians and surgeons supports a fine assessment of the contest over medical authority. One minor quibble is that curiosity, as a concept or culture that powered the study of nature and the acquisition of its objects, is less in evidence than perhaps it should be, given the material under consideration. But this is a small omission. Throughout, Harkness's archival research enables her to go beyond the secondary material and provide new insights, new names, and new problems in all of the fields upon which she has trained her lens. This archival evidence alone will provide countless leads for future students of Elizabethan London, and it is hard to imagine that the book will be surpassed as the best overall account of the sciences in action in late Renaissance England for years to come. Hannah Dawson's Locke, Language and Early-Modern Philosophy is a thoroughgoing and richly suggestive work of historical scholarship. Its range is enviably broad, and it succeeds in casting Locke's linguistic thought into new, and revealing, relief. Dawson divides her first monograph into three sections. The first of these considers early modern language theory through the trivium -the arts of logic, grammar and rhetoric as taught in early modern university curricula. She makes excellent use of textbooks in these three subjects, an unglamorous resource whose usefulness is too often overlooked by intellectual historians. The second section excavates and examines early modern anxieties about the corrupted nature of language, whether discussed as a tool with which to communicate, think, govern, come to moral judgements, or meditate on the divine. This is extremely helpful. As Dawson herself puts it in her introduction, 'by projecting on to early-modern linguistic thought our mission to discover how language works, we are easily blinded to the overriding source of its urgent energy: alarm that language did not work as it should' (5). Such anxieties were particularly acute for those concerned with the reform of natural philosophy, and Dawson accordingly pays close attention to the writings of (inter alia) Bacon, Descartes, Hobbes, Gassendi and Boyle, to say nothing of the so-called 'universal' language planners, whose efforts culminated in Wilkins's Essay Towards a Real Character and a Philosophical Language, published under the Royal Society's imprimatur in 1668. The book's third section turns to Locke himself. Here, Dawson makes a convincing case for seeing Locke's linguistic thought as an attack from which the traditional theory of language and meaning derived from Aristotle was unable to recover. For Aristotelians old, new and hybrid, things and our ideas of them (both of which are denoted by the challengingly elastic Latin term res) stood in naturally isomorphic to one another, while language comprised a series of tokens (i.e. words) that represented them conventionally. On Dawson's account, Locke's achievement was to rupture the natural relationship between human minds and the world; or, rather, to point out that traditional theory holding them together was fanciful. Dawson concludes her study with an intelligent attempt to explore the unsettling implications of all this for Locke's wider philosophical and political projects.
I found Dawson's account of the nuanced evolution of Locke's thought particularly compelling. Her attentiveness to his manuscript writings -whether in the form of his notes, journals, or the drafts that would become the Essay -nicely brings out the way in which Locke put more and more distance between his linguistic views and the tradition in which he had been educated. This approach also enables Dawson to present a more complete picture of Locke's ideas about language, taking in -for example -his thoughts on educational reform and biblical exegesis. Her refusal to confine language within its own philosophical ghetto is not only historically responsible, but is vindicated by important philosophical insights. My only criticism of Dawson's work is born largely of my feeling that Dawson has not pushed this approach hard enough. When reading the first two sections of Locke, Language and Early-Modern Philosophy, it quickly becomes apparent that Dawson's favoured historiographical mode is accumulation. She piles detail upon valuable detail, juxtaposing a range of familiar and unfamiliar texts with for the most part illuminating results; but there is a sense in which this accretion impedes the full development of her argument, particularly with respect to the origins and co-ordinates of Locke's linguistic thought. For example, although her reconstructions of early modern rhetoric and grammar have a great deal of scholarly utility, I am not sure that they earn their discursive keep in the way that her work on the logical traditional does. Certainly, the seventeenth century was much preoccupied with rhetoric as something that encouraged the abuse of language (thereby accelerating the process of its corruption), but there is little in Dawson's final chapters to suggest that this was an anxiety of the first order for Locke. If Dawson had formulated the first two sections of her book a little more sharply, it seems to me that she might have been able to depict the fundamental nature of Locke's break with the prevailing traditions of logical-linguistic thought even more arrestingly than she does.
Be this as it may, in the face of the very many things that this book does so well, such quibbles are unimportant. Dawson's ambitions, aims, learning, and sheer intellectual energy are exemplary. Locke, Language and Early-Modern Philosophy deserves to be read by anyone with an interest in Locke or early modern theories of language, and will reward them with new perspectives on seemingly familiar terrain. The neglected figure of Mark Pattison is brilliantly rediscovered by Jones's Intellect and Character in Victorian England, a substantive and fascinating study of his role in the formation of the modern university that, with a few apt but unobtrusive prompts, allows the reader to reflect freshly on the contemporary predicament of universities, and fundamental questions, prominent both then and now, about relations between teaching and research, and between the university and the economic, civic, and cultural needs of its society. Lesley Higgins's edition of the Oxford Essays and Notes of Gerard Manley Hopkins, the first of a new Collected Works, publishes for the first time the complete set of the poet's extant Oxford undergraduate essays and Birmingham notes on Greek philosophy, which he wrote from 1863 to 1868. This is a crucial resource for students of Hopkins's poetry and thought and an important record of a bright Balliol student's engagement with the post-1850 Universities Commission Literae Humaniores course as it was implemented at the college of Pattison's rival Benjamin Jowett, and under the direct tutelage also of Walter Pater, T. H. Green, and Robert Scott. Jones's study and Hopkins's essays and notes offer compelling insights into the modern transformation of university education in the mid-Victorian period, the precedent for its current upheavals and a radical perspectival point from which they can be evaluated.

Rhodri Lewis
Intellect and Character in Victorian England is elegantly structured to acquaint a contemporary readership with Pattison and present its thesis efficaciously. Divided into two parts, 'Lives' and 'Ideas', the first roundly introduces its subject from the various angles of family biography, his engagements with Tractarianism and German theology, university reforms, his rectorship of Lincoln College, his contribution to Essays and Reviews, his scholarly preoccupations with intellectual biography, his own Memoirs, literary portraits of him real and inferred (the abiding identification of him with Eliot's Casaubon is de-bunked here), and the erratic history of his late nineteenth and twentiethcentury afterlives. In opening up and exploring such varied elements the first part of the book provides the reader with a broad understanding of Pattison to bring to the more tightly focused second part, the main exposition of the book's thesis. The open discursivity of 'Lives' immediately quickens and coheres in 'Ideas', as apparently disparate aspects of Pattison's character, experience and intellectual development are drawn together to yield a rich, nuanced and critical defence of his life's work and a fuller explication of the vital role he took in forming both modern conceptions of the university and its academics, and the discipline of Intellectual History (a concern that gives the book an interesting reflexivity). Far from dividing the book, its bipartite structure endows it with an engaging dynamic unity, a tension between 'Lives' and 'Ideas' that it argues is definitive for Pattison. The central thesis, signalled by the book's title, notes Pattison's preoccupation and identification with the lives of other scholars, such as Casaubon and Scaliger, that he saw to exemplify the disciplined growth of the individual mind he aspired to and championed as the cultivating purpose of modern university education.
Despite Pattison's criticism that Balliol Greats, largely through Jowett's influence, was geared for turning out civil servants and imperial administrators, the evidence of Hopkins's essays and notes demonstrates the remarkable vigour, intellectual freedom, and contemporaneity of the newly renovated degree. They show that, far from simply manufacturing public functionaries, Balliol Greats was decisive in forming a private and powerfully original poet and thinker, an interesting variant case of Pattison's ideal, the scholar who, eschewing considerations of material reward, honours, and reputation, devotes himself to the life of the mind. Neglecting to keep his Oxford essays and notes on philology, Hopkins evidently valued the material published here, which documents the predominantly philosophical nature of Balliol Literae Humaniores in the 1860s. These texts cover a range of topics in aesthetics, political philosophy, the philosophy of history, the Presocratics, Plato, and Aristotle, as well as modern philosophy, from Bacon and Descartes to Kant, Hegel, and the Whewell-Mill controversy over the nature of induction.
A generation after Pattison, Hopkins was similarly attracted to Tractarianism and mentored by J. H. Newman, who guided him in his decision to convert to Catholicism and join the Society of Jesus soon after graduating from Oxford. Jones reminds us of the radicalism of the original Tractarians, and the intellectual openness and independence of Newman, arguing subtly and convincingly for their legacies in forming the later, notoriously liberal, Pattison. In an interesting mirroring of Pattison, Hopkins immerses himself in the liberalism of Jowett's Balliol, and despite the anti-intellectual efforts of Liddon, emerges from Oxford to formulate his own rigorous and deeply religious personal metaphysic in the 1868 Birmingham notes. Jones's subtle and scrupulous scholarship is instructive here for Hopkins studies, which has tended to reproduce the simplistic partisan oppositions between the liberals and the established churches that, as his book documents, originally precluded constructive public debate over the Essays and Reviews. There has been an abiding, almost constitutional, assumption in Hopkins studies that the poet's sympathies with Tractarianism at Oxford and his later conversion naturally makes the German 'Higher Criticism', and with it modern German philosophy and its proponents at Oxford (indeed any form or rationalism or intellectual liberalism), anathema to the poet. While this simple schema is implicit to much of Higgins's editorial material, the evidence of Hopkins's previously unpublished essays and notes (which incidentally include notes from Pattison's contribution to Essays and Reviews) makes it unsustainable. His Oxford writings vigorously defend the grounds of his religious belief by asserting versions of philosophical idealism and realism, from the Eleatics and Plato through to Kant, Hamilton, Whewell, and the incipient British Idealism of his teachers, Jowett and Green, against the positivism, utilitarianism, and materialism of Mill, Comte, and 'the Darwinians'.
Higgins offers some useful contexts and clues for appreciating the significance of the important body of work she has carefully transcribed, including some chronologies, a list of relevant reference texts available to Hopkins, scholarly discussions of the dates of the notebooks, and sketches of his teachers that draw upon neglected primary sources. However, while the 1860s Literae Humaniores course is described in some detail, it is barely contextualized, so that there is little sense of the radical changes it had recently undergone (a section promisingly entitled 'Revisiting and Revisioning Oxford' is given over to Arnold's 'Oxonian adulation' in Essays in Criticism, followed by an admission that it bears no relation to the Oxford Hopkins experienced). Indeed, the editor often appears uncomfortable with conceptual material. Philosophical ideas and their sources are sometimes simply ignored (e.g. for the entirety of essay D.II.5 on perception), or glossed with a few lines from Frederick Copleston. A reference by Hopkins to 'the atomism of Humery and Positivism' is glossed with an historical outline of atomist ontology that stops short of its reference, the epistemological applications in Hume and the 1860s renewal of atomism by, e.g. Huxley and Tyndall (255). While there are many useful textual references to figures such as Grote, Lewes, and Hamilton, there is little commentary on Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, the single most studied text in Balliol Greats, with no references to Alexander Grant's essays in his edition (which was Hopkins's text), nor to his tutor T. H. Green's review essay of this edition (or indeed any of Green's 1860s essays or mss.) Hopkins's undergraduate philosophical studies and speculations culminate in his 1868 Notes with the formulation of his personal metaphysic, the originality of which requires him to coin his terms 'stress', 'instress', and 'inscape', which form the theoretical basis not only for his religious belief but for the idiosyncratic mature poetry upon which his reputation rests. The job of glossing the most important of these notes, those on 'Parmenides' in which he introduces his coinages, is in this edition handed over to the classicist Dr Ross G. Arthur, who furnishes a fine philological commentary. It is, however, one that astonishingly makes no mention at all of Hopkins's coinages and the metaphysic they describe, nor does it trace the eccentric and anachronistic reading of the Eleatics from which it proceeds here, or offer links to the Oxford essays. Such crucial topics are not discussed by Higgins in her introductory essays, which nevertheless find space and a tenuous excuse for a long footnote quoting Foucault on masturbation (36-7). Indeed, there is something of a fetish for Foucault here. The Foucauldian promise of the portentously entitled section 'The Construction and Production of Knowledge' transplants into a discussion of Hopkins's studies some brief extracts from an unrelated context in The Order of Things, apparently to lend a Foucauldian aura to the occasion. A footnote attached to one of these misleading quotations lists three critical works (none of which are on Hopkins) that are informed by 'Foucauldian insights'. This is followed by another that lists 'non-or pre-Foucauldian discussions of GMH' (22). In a droll but evidently unwitting irony, Foucault becomes the criterion for a pair of arbitrary categories, in relation to which the editor is cast as that rare and radical thing, a Foucauldian Hopkins scholar.
It is to be hoped that readers use Higgins's often apt and helpful, if at times eccentric and incomplete, notes and introductory material critically in ways that open up and renew Hopkins studies, as the overdue publication of these texts promises to do. Jones's book would make an excellent adjunct here. Indeed, it will be indispensible to all students of Victorian Oxford and modern European intellectual history. Ten years ago Roger Smith's impressive History of the Human Sciences was published in the Fontana history of science series. That volume showed how writers, from the sixteenth century to the present, studied humankind. Despite vast differences in approach, philosophers, sociologists, anthropologists, biologists, and psychologists were brought by Smith into a single framework, since they shared the common problem of understanding 'man'. While Smith offered an impressive overview of the contributions of Locke, Darwin, Marx, Freud, and numerous other thinkers to this wide-ranging topic, he also emphasized the importance of adopting an historical perspective in order to appreciate how we have developed our self-understanding. He impressed on his readers that history should not be considered as of merely antiquarian interest but instead argued that we are constituted through the historical quest to understand ourselves. The present volume extends this latter theme in an incisive and exciting manner by arguing the centrality of history in the creation of human nature. While acknowledging the many different methods that have been deployed in order to comprehend humankind, Smith urges that self-understanding arises most effectively from historical reflection. Drawing on the historiographical tradition beginning with Vico and running through Herder and a number of (principally) continental philosophers of the twentieth century, Smith identifies the crux of historical understanding to be its reflexivity. Through this reflexivity we become the subject of history and the study of history creates our self-understanding. There is no immoveable fulcrum enabling the historian to stand outside of history; instead, to quote Smith, 'The history of the human sciences […] encompasses the history of human beings changing themselves'.
As an historian of the human sciences Smith is sensitive to earlier projects to understand humankind and the difficulties each has encountered. Thus he rejects such proposals as the attempt to create a philosophical anthropology, which effectively ended with Habermas, and the many positivist programmes in the social sciences that have ignored the issue of reflexivity and instead sought to make the human subject into a disengaged object of study. By contrast, Smith draws on writers such as Collingwood and Gardamer to articulate a notion of narrative history that accords meaning to human thoughts and actions. Just as the biographer seeks to understand the subject through a close study of his or her life, so the understanding of human nature emerges through a creative engagement with history. Smith emphasizes the aim of history to be human understanding; and he is highly critical of those who seek an all-encompassing general theory that would explain human action according to a set of covering laws. Indeed, the similarities and differences between the natural sciences, the social sciences and the humanities provide a theme that recurs frequently throughout this book.
Smith recognizes that natural scientists usually portray themselves an engaged in a non-reflexive activity. Indeed, outside the strange world of quantum mechanics, they generally posit nature as fixed and objectively determinable, as are the laws of nature. Likewise, most social scientists, following Comte, conceive the social sciences as seeking the laws of human action analogous to the laws governing the natural sciences. Yet developments in the philosophy and sociology of science during the last half-century have challenged the assumptions underpinning this positivist conception of science and instead have insisted that science itself should be seen as a human activity. Adopting a constructivist view of science, Smith argues that it, too, is fundamentally historical and reflexive.